


Believe Me, You Don’t Even Have to Try

by theshipsfirstmate



Series: You Are the Best Thing [1]
Category: Pitch (TV 2016)
Genre: F/M, Song fic, things that are lerayon's fault
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-09
Updated: 2017-04-09
Packaged: 2018-10-16 15:24:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,702
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10574100
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theshipsfirstmate/pseuds/theshipsfirstmate
Summary: For lerayon, who had the nerve to bring Ray LaMontagne into the Mike Lawson life soundtrack game."It’s been a long day of travel after a two-week road trip to the east coast, and Ginny’s dead on her feet, but the second she opens the front door to Mike’s house, it’s like something sparks inside her."





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lerayon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lerayon/gifts).



A/N: Inspired by [lerayon](http://archiveofourown.org/users/lerayon/pseuds/lerayon), who had the nerve to [bring Ray LaMontagne](https://lerayon.tumblr.com/post/159323999657/its-been-established-that-ryan-adams-provides-the) into the Mike Lawson life soundtrack game, which sent me into a song spiral and came up with this.  

Title from "You Are the Best Thing" by Ray LaMontagne.

**Believe Me, You Don’t Even Have to Try**

Something happens when she opens the front door.

It’s been a long day of travel after a two-week road trip to the east coast, and Ginny’s dead on her feet, but the second she opens the front door to Mike’s house, it’s like something sparks inside her.

She hears him first, tapping percussion on a pot in the kitchen, humming along to tinny music that must be playing out of his iPhone. (She rolls her eyes, the man’s got a wireless speaker system installed in every room of his beautiful house and would rather suffer in stubbornness than admit he can’t figure it out.) The whole house smells like garlic and tomato and Ginny’s stomach lets out an audible growl. Mike’s taken up cooking as one of his retirement hobbies and unsurprisingly, he’s as good at that as he is at everything else. And he is good at _everything_. God, she’s missed him.

They’re still figuring out how all of this works: him with her and her with him and him without the game. And it was Mike who had laid down the ground rules for Ginny’s first pro season without him, though they also pertained to the team he was leaving behind after more than 20 years.

_“I’ll be there watching whenever I can, cheering you guys on,” he promised her one night as they lay tangled in her bedsheets, coming down from a fight about their future and the steamy, possessive sex that had followed. “But I don’t want to do anything special. I don’t want to travel with the team or sit in the dugout or come down to the locker room.”_

_Ginny had just nodded, willing herself to blink away the tears that clouded her eyes because she knew he was right and how important it was. The thought, though, of suiting up without him, of stepping out to the mound and not seeing him crouching 60 feet away, sent a pang to her heart every time._

_“I just think there needs to be clearly set boundaries,” he had continued, even though she was already agreeing, pressing kisses to his bare chest and wrapping herself around him for the night. “I’ve got to find out where I stand, I’ve got to figure out…who I am now.”_

_Later, after the lights were out and his breathing had slowed, Ginny whispered the truth and felt Mike’s arms tighten around her. “I know who you are.”_

This had been her first long road trip away, and what socks Ginny in the gut the minute she steps through the door is how glad she is to be home. She can’t remember when she started thinking of Mike’s place as home, and they certainly haven’t had any kind of talk about living together, but she hadn’t even thought twice when entering her Uber destination from the airport. _Home_. There’s no other way to describe the swell in her chest at the sound and smells and sights that wash over her, no other word that better explains how he makes her feel.

She stops in the kitchen doorway, just watching him for a second. He stands at the stove with his back to her, dressed in her favorite jeans, a v-neck shirt and an honest-to-goodness apron – a Padres “Kiss the Cook” novelty that she bought him as a joke but he now wears religiously.

After tossing something in one of the pans, Mike turns from to the stove to the counter, dipping his hands into a bowl of tomatoes and giving his hips a little shake in time with the music. Ginny can’t help it when a full laugh stutters from her lips at that, and it’s enough to alert him to her presence.

“Gin!” He breaths her name in surprise and his eyes lock on hers before snapping back down at his tomato-covered hands and back up again. “You’re back!”

She stands frozen at the look in his eyes – like a kid on Christmas – but manages to stammer out a greeting as Mike rushes to the sink, rinsing off his hands and hastily wiping them on a kitchen towel as he approaches her, tossing it aside right before his arms wrap around her midsection. She drops back a few steps but he catches her, of course he does, lifting her just off the ground on a little spin. She bands her arms around his neck, reveling in the feeling of his beard against her cheek as he whispers her name again.

“Hey,” she croaks out, struck a little dumb but not entirely surprised by the ferocity of his welcome. Part of her gets it, because part of her is just as passionately happy to see him, too. She presses her lips to the closest part of his face and then he’s lowering her to the ground, backing her up against the doorjamb so his hands can frame her face while he kisses her deep.

It’s sweet and hot and slow and urgent all at the same time and after two weeks away, Ginny’s practically crawling out of her skin already, dragging her nails along his back through the thin material of his shirt, twisting her fingers around the tie of his apron.

When they finally pull back for air, when her eyes finally open again, she sees his smoldering gaze under a slightly furrowed brow.

“I thought I was picking you up?” Before the season, he had scoffed at the idea of meeting her in the stadium parking lot along with the rest of the team wives, but he hadn’t missed one yet; Ginny never asked, but found him waiting by his car with a proud smile on his face every time. “I was gonna give Duarte a piece of my mind about the third inning of that Cleveland game.”

“I asked to catch an earlier flight.” She laughs off his half-hearted threat and goes soft at his sly smile, tangling her fingers in the hair at the nape of his neck. Mike shudders under his breath and Ginny feels it more than hears it. God, she’s missed him. Her hips shift unconsciously when he rocks against her and their arms tighten around each other. “We were done in Philly and I’ve got a start in two days.”

He pulls back a little further and cocks an eyebrow, but there’s too much emotion in his eyes to pull the skepticism she knows he’s trying for. Her heart skips a guilty step, and so she tells him the simplest, truest thing she can think of right now.

“I just wanted to come home.” She looks up at him, but Mike’s eyes have drifted just past her to the hallway by his front door, where her suitcase and gym bag are stacked next to her sneakers. When he looks back at her, there’s a little bit of those Christmas eyes again and a whole lot more of something else she’s still too afraid to name. But only just.

“I’m glad you did.” The scratch in his throat betrays the goofy grin on his face and so she cards her fingers through his beard and presses her lips back to his, over and over again, until she feels the tension drain from his shoulders. This time when he pulls back, there’s nothing but a smile that makes her knees go weak.

“The only bummer is, you kind of screwed up my schedule,” he admits with a laugh, kissing the back of her hand before he has to let it go. She doesn’t stay frozen in the doorway this time, following him into the kitchen and perching herself on a countertop, watching silently as he quickly finishes the lasagna and slides it into the oven. “I had at least an hour of pick-up time built into baking this.”

He’s back in front of her then, inches from her face, and somehow, it’s an even better distance than 60 feet ever was. They were good like that, great even, but like this, they’re so much more. She knows it’s once in a lifetime. And she knows what’s coming.

She’s been skittish, just a little, but she’s getting better. Last week, a newbie reporter had the balls to ask her if she thought Mike Lawson was disappointed to end his career without ever getting a ring. Ginny knows something’s changing, because she had to bite her tongue almost to bleeding to keep from telling the kid, _“He still might.”_

Now, Mike stands in between her open legs, expression somewhere between reverence and thirst. Ginny’s eyes glance down to his left hand, splayed across her thigh, and she imagines, for just a second, what it might look like with a hint of gold or silver. She still can’t believe it sometimes, that they’re making this work. She can’t believe that she can touch him like this, that she can want him like this, that she can come by his house after a road trip and he’ll be waiting for her, cooking for her, missing her like she’s missed him.

“Gee, I wonder what we could do with an hour.” A little roll of her hips is all it takes for his eyes to darken and in no time, he’s pulling her off the counter and tugging her back to his bedroom, pausing halfway down the hallway to press her again the wall and slide his hands under her sweats for an orgasm that she knows will be the first of many.

She comes with a cry of his name and then lets her repetitive subconscious speak out loud. “God, I missed you.”

Mike holds her still until she comes all the way back to Earth, kissing her lips softly, almost hypnotically, until her entire focus is on his eyes, his mouth, the press of his body against hers and the breathtaking meaning of his next words. 

“Welcome home, Ginny.”


End file.
